Pulse
by Missie2
Summary: Hiccup and Jack provide backdrops and orchestrals for a famous AI diva, whose singing voice is provided by both Rapunzel and Merida. It's a strange setup to be sure, and it gets stranger when the AI decides she wants to work alone. Completely alone...
1. Chapter 1

Pulse

…..

I am very much aware that I shouldn't be starting a fic series right now as my real life is chock-a-block with stuff, but this idea just wouldn't leave me alone. As a result, updates may be sporadic.

So, in this universe, Rapunzel and Merida are the voice banks for an AI performer, swapping back and forth on different vocal styles. Hiccup is the AI's tech supervisor and Jack works the electronic orchestra. There is mild tension, and then things get weeeeeird…

…..

There was no question of who would arrive at the stadium first; it was always Hiccup, wheeling his gigantic hard drive in a granny cart past the throngs of people already queuing, though they wouldn't even be letting people into the building for another three hours. Harmony had already been uploaded the night before and prepping the stage and the control room for the concert would only take 40 minutes at most, but Hiccup was a careful chap, one might even say fatalistic. Something was bound to go wrong, he always thought, so getting a head start with the setup would at least give him the edge to solve any problems that did arise.

The bouncers barely glanced at him as he flashed his badge and shuffled into the building, a scrawny, shaggy-headed youth whose age could not be determined by looking at him; he could have been anywhere from fourteen to thirty. His clothes were clean but unremarkable, the prototypical t-shirt with some logo for something on it under an unbuttoned plaid shirt, jeans that were decidedly unskinny and baggy enough to conceal both of his feet, a sheepish, slightly nervous expression. He made it all the way to the projection room door before anyone even thought to ask him for ID.

Once inside, he booted up his laptop and plugged his hard drive into it, and searched the tubes for Harmony. Toothless popped up first, floating around the screen and pulling out webpages without being prompted.

"Not now, bud," Hiccup admonished. "Big concert in four hours."

Toothless nodded eagerly, threw the webpages away with a flourish and brought out the holograph software, flipping through the palettes until he found Hiccup's most commonly used tools. He could be trusted with this; for all that this AI had his own mind and personality he complimented Hiccups' so well he could almost be trusted to run the concert's effects by himself. Almost.

Harmony made her entrance on the laptop, and spread herself over the rest of the screens in the room until she reached the projector and attempted to switch it on. She always seemed eager to burst out of the computer. Toothless snorted at her from the corner of Hiccup's laptop, and Hiccup gave him a tap with the cursor. Harmony was a performer after all, she couldn't help wanting to break onto the stage.

"You don't have too long to wait," Hiccup told her. "We'll just do some costume changes first, okay?"

Harmony looked down imperiously at him. Hiccup was no stranger to that look from girls, but from an AI it was still pretty weird. Nevertheless, he chose a set of brushes and started painting bright rainbow streaks on the underside of her arching pigtails.

…..

Rapunzel arrived two hours before showtime, clutching an iced lemonade in both hands and nervously scanning the projection room. Even now, eight months after she'd been recruited to provide Harmony's vocals, she seemed overwhelmed by all that entailed. Hiccup waved a greeting, as did Toothless from his corner of the laptop screen.

"Hey Punz, what do you think? Too much?" Hiccup asked her, gesturing at Harmony. He could have guessed her answer.

"Um…" she mumbled, squeezing her lemonade gently. "A little bit. It's lovely and all, but it's a bit…."

Harmony's jellyfish gown, crafted for her torch songs, was pale blue with speckles of luminescent purple and pink darting about the full bubble skirt, pulsing in and out to the beat of the backing track. The tentacles wrapped around her shoulders and neck to form a high collar and her hair was pulled up into a gravity-defying triple bun. She'd opened the projector into the room and was standing proudly with one hand on her hip, smiling serenely and gazing out at Rapunzel under her blue-tinted eyelashes.

Rapunzel's own outfit was considerably less spectacular. A pale pink twinset with a blue floral print skirt, ballet flats and a single barrette trying and failing to keep one side of her hair off of her face. It had the uncanny effect of making her look like a schoolgirl and a soccer mom at the same time.

"Wouldn't it be better to leave her hair loose? I mean, she's meant to be underwater for those songs, so it'd be sort of mermaid-style, right?" she suggested with an eager but awkward smile. Before meeting Rapunzel, Hiccup had never thought anyone could be more stressed out by interacting with the outside world than he was.

But that was uncharitable, so he stomped on those thoughts. Rapunzel had been raised in some sort of fundamentalist church society and she'd broken away from them less than a year before, and just a month longer than she'd been a part of Harmonica LTD. You could still see it in the way she dressed, in her three feet of hair that had rarely been cut, in her constant need to apologize for even having an opinion on something.

"You might be on to something," Hiccup said, and the way she beamed made it worth the dirty look Harmony shot him.

He took down the buns and let her hair flow freely. It was a little blank against the spectacular dress, so he added long strings of glowing pearls and seaweed ribbons, and left the colour at a turquoise ombre running to deep marine blue.

"Perfect," Rapunzel sighed, then she curled up in the corner to start her vocal warmups.

…..

Jack sauntered through the door an hour before showtime, ruffled Hiccup's hair obnoxiously and flopped down in the corner to shoot the breeze with Rapunzel, casually ignoring all the prep work he was supposed to be doing.

"Uh, Jack?" Hiccup began.

"Relax, pancake, we've got plenty of time. 'Sides, T-Rex isn't here yet."

Rapunzel giggled and Hiccup rolled his eyes. The nicknames were a mystery, they seemed to come out of nowhere and have no relation to anything they had ever said or done. Hiccup suspected, with his degree in armchair psychology, that they were all part of this ploy Jack had going on to make him seem witty and quirky and interesting because he felt he was none of those things in reality.

His clothes straddled the line between trying too hard and not trying at all. Skinny jeans of course, like any good hipster. Quirky hat, this one a pale blue beanie with a silver snowflake worn in the middle of July for ultimate quirk points. Oversized hoodie with a beer company logo despite the fact that Jack wouldn't legally be allowed to drink for two more years.

Rapunzel thought that Jack was the most amazing man she'd ever met. He was just like all of those effortlessly cool guys she'd only seen on television before. The fact that Jack clearly put a lot of effort into crafting his personality was lost on her, who had only known boys brought up in the same sheltered way she had been.

Jack barely glanced at Harmony, and she stonily ignored him in turn. As far as Jack was concerned, the real art was in the music he produced and Harmony herself was just a conduit to filter it through to the masses. He plugged in his keyboard and virtual string system and warmed up for a matter of minutes, then took a short nap under the table.

…..

Merida blustered in just a half hour before showtime, just as Rapunzel was being fitted with the OVP device. Unlike the other three, who at least somewhat planned their lives to fit around their concert schedule, Merida seemed to think the concerts were just a thing that she had to stop by on her way to something more interesting. She was dressed as though she'd just rolled out of bed and run to the stadium in whatever clothes she had handy, in this case denim shorts over blue sparkly tights and a t-shirt so big it was hanging off one shoulder. The t-shirt had a dinosaur on it, probably a non-verbal challenge to Jack regarding the nickname. It was hard to tell if she'd brushed her hair or just left it like that, it seemed to look the same no matter what.

"Cutting it a bit fine, dontcha think?" Jack needled at her. It was fine for Hiccup to say that, as the designated responsible one of the group, but Jack was doing it to be obnoxious. Hiccup was almost annoyed on her behalf.

"Had an eye appointment," she responded, gulping down the last of Rapunzel's lemonade.

That shut him up. Jack could needle anyone about just about anything, but the subject of Hiccup's prosthetic, Rapunzel's parents or Merida's eyepatch were off-limits and he knew it. Even if today's eyepatch was ripe for parody, covered as it was with crudely drawn stick ninjas most likely done by one or all of Merida's three younger brothers.

She scratched at it irritably as she went through her warm-ups, standing uncomfortably close to Hiccup as she did so, as she always did. To be fair, Merida always seemed to stand too close to him even when she was on the other side of the room. Her very presence seemed to suck the air out of him. To distract himself, he fussed with the vectors on Harmony's chainlink evening gown for her hair metal songs.

"That doesn't look to comfortable," Merida commented, suddenly leaning over his shoulder. He gulped.

"Well, it's not for real life obviously," Hiccup retorted. "But it'll look good on stage."

She grunted non-commitally, and wandered off again to chatter with Rapunzel. Hiccup exhaled sharply, and was annoyed to find Jack grinning at him from under the table with one eyebrow raised.

…..

The curtain rose over the stage and the lights burst over the audience, drenching the entire room with a blanket of deep space and shimmering starlight. Harmony floated into being, an alien princess in a gown of glowing lunar dust, perched on one foot on a planet. When she opened her mouth, a shower of meteors issued forth.

In the projection room, strapped firmly into the OVP device, Rapunzel began to sing.

…..


	2. Chapter 2

Pulse

Chapter Two

Rapunzel's Good Day

…..

Please excuse the overly florid description of clothing in this fic, and indeed in all fics I've been writing lately. I'm a latent fashion designer; I can't help mentally dressing everyone.

…

After she'd left Brightcircle, Rapunzel had a hard time shedding the habits the church had instilled in her. She still woke most mornings at dawn. She kept her eyes closed in the shower. She almost did up her buttons to the neck until she realized and forced herself to stop. Even something as simple like dancing to the music on the radio brought her out in a cold sweat, fearful that someone would see her.

One thing she liked and kept doing, though, were the affirmations.

She greeted herself in the mirror cheerfully, held her hands out with palms facing the ceiling, and repeated the words ten times until she felt the optimism in them sink in.

"Today will be a good day."

Brightcircle's affirmations were usually thanks or offerings to the Lord, or begging forgiveness for some indiscretion, but Rapunzel felt her more secular one suited her new life. Everything had been so intimidating at first but each day had brought something new. They were all good days. This would also be a good day.

Even if the queasy feeling in her stomach didn't go away completely.

…..

She arranged to meet each of her friends on this day, mostly so she wouldn't spend the hours between _the task _mulling and fretting. And oh, how thrilling to have friends! People who wanted to spend time with her, of their own volition. It made her giddy to think of it.

She met Jack at 9:30am, in the gate plaza. He wanted to go to some obscure music shop to experiment with the instruments and he'd said he wanted a good ear with him. As she approached, she saw him scan her outfit critically and, he thought, discreetly. Her cheeks burned. She was moving away from twinsets and skirts now, but apparently her loose floral smock and cardigan was still too conservative for his liking.

"Hey, Teacup," he greeted her breezily.

"Hello," she mumbled back. She still wasn't sure how she was supposed to react to the odd nicknames.

"Ready to make some music?"

They made their way to the shop at a good pace, his long legs sloping ahead as she struggled to keep up with tiny steps. She resisted the urge to drop behind him, at least an arm's length behind, as she'd been taught. He made small talk along the way that she mostly responded to with little acknowledgements, never adding to the conversation. Luckily, Jack loved to talk and loved having someone listen even more. It made things considerably less awkward.

The shop was odd-looking, could have been mistaken for an antique shop at first glance. There was an ancient chaise sitting just beside the door, and odd lamps and vases everywhere. The shopkeeper, a tiny woman with rainbow-streaked hair, looked up from her phone for a moment to wave at Jack, and was gone again.

"She's a friend of mine," he told her. "Saves all the good stuff in the back for me."

The 'good stuff' she had saved for him this time was a dust-covered marimba missing several keys, a tarnished bugle, a sitar, and, he was especially delighted to find, a bodhran.

"Merida'll get a kick out of this one, eh?" he said, tapping on it lightly.

"But…." she began, and then stopped. _He's the musician, don't question him._

"Buuuut….?" he prodded, still tapping.

"She's Scottish, not Irish," she mumbled, then looked down at her feet.

"Oh right! Duh," he laughed, slapping his forehead. "She'd probably just throw it at me. So I should definitely get it. You know any Irish songs?"

"No, sorry," she replied with relief. "I only ever played Gospel music."

"What instrument did you play?"

She panicked a little now, knowing she'd inadvertedly revealed something deeply personal for him to judge her on. Jack could play anything and everything, even the way he drummed the spoons on their studio coffee cups was pure genius because of his talented fingers. She had strummed a few notes during choir on a battered old guitar somebody had found at the dump. She'd loved that guitar. She'd cried when they burned it.

"I played the guitar a little, but not anymore," she mumbled.

He didn't pry into the reasons why, and she felt a rush of gratitude for that. It was only 10am, and she didn't want to collapse into a blubbering mess so early in the day. Instead, he rummaged around in the shelves for a bit. He came back with a small case and pressed it into her hands.

"I saw this here last month, you should take a bash at it," he told her.

Opening the case, she found what looked like a small guitar. Yellow, and painted with red and purple flowers.

"It's a ukulele," he said. "It's a little easier than guitar. Gives anything you play an island feel. Seems like your kind of instrument."

She gave it an experimental twang, still too overwhelmed to speak. The fact that Jack thought of her at all, let alone picked out an instrument for her, was just too much. She felt tears gather at the corners of her eyes. Jack was messing with the bodhran now and avoiding her gaze.

Slowly, nervously, she picked out a tune on the ukulele. It was a hymn, because of course it was, she knew almost no other songs besides Harmony's multi-instrumented productions, but it had been one of her favourites as a child. On the ukulele, it had a sweeter air, a happier tone. It filled her from head to toe with sunshine.

Jack gave her one of his sunniest grins as she finished, and a rare compliment.

"Not bad."

…..

She'd texted Merida the night before asking if she was free, and only got a response after she and Jack had parted ways, at 11:30.

_No, not free at all. _

_Have to see Mum and Dad tonight. _

_Freaking out. _

_But come over anyway. _

_Bring food. _

Read like that, the text was almost like a bizarre poem. She stopped at the bakers' two blocks from Merida's apartment and bought a selection of pastries.

The banging and clattering coming from the apartment could be heard from the ground floor, as well as a smattering of indecipherable shouting. She tapped the buzzer gently, timidly, so tempted to just leave. Obviously Merida was busy and wouldn't want her getting in the way…..

The intercom crackled sharply.

"It's open, c'mon up!"

Merida was doing a very convincing impression of a hurricane as Rapunzel slid into the apartment; whirling around from room to room carrying random bundles of cloth, dressed just in pajama pants and a sports bra, hair so big it looked like it was actively trying to escape from her head. She seemed to visibly relax, though, when Rapunzel handed her a danish.

"Thank God you're here," she said between bites, as she put the kettle on to boil. "I'm having a crisis."

"What's wrong?"

Rapunzel couldn't help feeling a little grateful for Merida's drama distracting her from her own, and followed it with an immediate wave of guilt for being grateful.

"I'm due at the oldies' house in four hours, and I still don't know what to do about _this!"_

Merida held up her left arm, and Rapunzel saw the problem right away. In fact, she was surprised she'd missed it so far. There was a long gash on the inside, starting at the wrist and clearing the elbow, dark red and shiny. Rapunzel winced in sympathy.

"Ouch. How did that happen?" she asked.

"Bloody bow string scraped the skin off. My aim's off by about 3 millimetres, I can't seem to get it placed."

Probably had something to do with only having the use of one eye, Rapunzel thought, but she kept it to herself. She saw Merida's problem straight away; her parents had no idea she was still in training, or where she was getting the money to train from. They'd cut her funding after the accident.

"Did you try covering it with concealer? Or foundation?" she tentatively suggested, though she knew little to nothing about make-up.

"Tried and failed," Merida nodded. "Made it look worse, if you can believe that. Looked like I'd been shooting up. Serves me right for being so blimmin' pale."

"Then…long sleeves?"

"Tried that too," she muttered, pouring freshly boiled water into a teapot and handing Rapunzel a mug. "It just looks like I'm trying to hide something. That's the first thing me Mum would see."

She went into a most likely exaggerated pantomime of her mother, posture unnaturally straight and hands flapping about like little birds.

_"Ooh, what's this? I've been begging you to wear long sleeves to dinner for years, and you're actually doing it? There must be devilment afoot, reveal your sins you wee get!"_

Rapunzel couldn't help it, she burst into gales of laughter, though she tried to cover her mouth.

"Glad someone's having fun today," Merida moaned, theatrically dumping herself into a kitchen chair and flopping facefirst across the table.

"Sorry," Rapunzel gasped. "I'm here to help, I swear!"

She poured her friend a conciliatory mug of tea and placed it gently in front of her.

"Maybe I could have a look through your wardrobe? I might find something you overlooked!"

Merida waved her hand away without rising from the table.

"Have at it, good luck."

Merida's bedroom itself was small, standard issue for students living away from home and mostly taken up with the bed, which was currently covered in clothes. However, she had the place to herself and had turned the connecting bedroom into a walk-in wardrobe. Merida herself didn't care that much about what she wore, but she'd told Rapunzel once that her mother insisted that they spend at least one day a month doing something together, and that something usually ended up being clothes shopping. As a result, half of the dresses and skirts Rapunzel ruffled through on the hangers still had price tags attached.

There was even a small vanity dresser in one corner, of the kind that Rapunzel had dreamed of owning while she was waiting for a turn of the small mirror she shared with seven other girls at Brightcircle. It even had a three-panelled mirror. Rapunzel allowed herself a sneaky little indulgence and sat down at the dresser. Merida wouldn't mind, she was sure.

She ran her fingers through her hair like a comb, imagining for a moment what it would have been like to have more than five minutes to get ready of a morning, and the means to make herself look pretty beyond Vaseline or lipbalm. Merida had some make-up, that she only wore when she could be bothered, but it was shoved to one side and most of the vanity was taken up with what she used the mirror for the most; maintenance of her injured eye. There were packets of Q-tips, stacks of bandages and spare eyepatches, bottles of clear liquid, and many, many pills.

In an instant Rapunzel felt like she'd been snooping, so she got up and resumed looking through her friend's clothes.

When she walked back into the kitchen, Merida was wolfing down another pastry. Merida held up the dress she'd picked out for approval. It was a simple white A-line dress with a pink ribbon trim, but cut short enough above the knees to not be considered prim.

Merida snorted.

"If I wear that, me Mam'll tie my knees together at the table!"

"I know," Rapunzel told her breezily. "It's classic misdirection. She'll be so caught up with how short your skirt is she won't even notice you're wearing long sleeves."

"That's awfully devious," Merida laughed. "I love it. What long sleeves am I wearing?"

Rapunzel took off her own cardigan and handed it over. It was pale green with pearl buttons, probably too prissy to go with her own calf-length smock but matched with the little white dress it was dinner-with-the-parents-worthy. More importantly, the sleeves would cover the wound.

"Thanks," Merida said, taking the cardigan. "But now you have nothing to wear with your dress."

Rapunzel shrugged. "I was looking too _Little House on the Prairie _as it is."

"Hope Jack wasn't the one who told you that. The pioneer look suits you. It's cute."

"No, he didn't," Rapunzel defended him, though she still felt the little stab of his scrutiny from earlier. "I'm trying to experiment with my look a bit."

Merida looked lost in thought for a moment, then suddenly dashed off to her bedroom. She emerged moments later with a dark pink corduroy blazer on a hanger and tossed it to Rapunzel.

"Give this a try," she said.

The price tag was still attached. 170 dollars.

"Thank you," she spluttered. "But I can't…"

"Ah, pish," Merida scoffed. "It looks awful with my hair. Give it a good home."

Her friend's generosity often caught Rapunzel off guard. At Brightcircle personal possessions were meagre and jealously hoarded, and could be used against you if somebody felt you needed to be punished. To be handed new things so easily, and twice in one day, with no strings attached felt so alien it had her looking for the ulterior motive.

But Merida clearly didn't have one. She'd never met a girl who broadcast her intentions so clearly and easily. Here was a person who knew exactly who she was and her place in the world, and it still intimidated Rapunzel as much as it drew her in.

She pulled on the blazer as Merida was getting changed. Looking in the mirror she was delighted to see that the cut of the blazer changed the look of her frumpy old dress completely. It nipped in her waist and brought up the hemline of the dress a little, and the three-quarter length sleeves showed off a pleasant amount of skin. It even brought out the colour of her eyes and made them sparkle. Her hair, though, shiny and immaculately kept as it was, looked too dull against the sharpness of the outfit.

Merida emerged after a little while fully dressed, hair pinned up in a messy topknot. As Rapunzel predicted, the dress and cardigan together was just edgy-looking enough to still be _her, _but straightlaced enough to please her mother. She'd added pale pink ankle boots and white stockings, and a smear of lip gloss. Standing near her, Rapunzel felt decidedly unglamorous. She dared a request.

"Um, do you think you could do something with my hair? It looks a bit…"

"Sure," Merida answered, as she was peeling away her eyepatch to put on a fresh one. Rapunzel looked away.

Merida kitted her out with a fishtail braid that looked intricate, but she was assured was 'dead easy'. She wrapped it around her head like a tiara and pinned it with a sunflower hairpin. When Rapunzel assured her that she'd return it, Merida just shrugged.

…..

She left it until the very last minute to leave Merida's apartment, possibly hoping to absorb some of Merida's bolshiness by osmosis before _the task. _But she couldn't put it off forever, and at least now she looked different. Perhaps she would feel different too.

She met Flynn _(Eugene, his name is Eugene)_ in a small café with enclosed booths she'd chosen to give them some privacy. He was already there when she arrived, and he rose to greet her as she walked in. Her heart felt like it was going to drop into her shoes when she saw him.

He looked…._wrong. _

His goatee was gone. His hair was slicked back so severely it looked painted on. His white starched shirt and black trousers washed out his complexion. Even the sideways grin that had so attracted her to him seemed to have disappeared, replaced by a wide toothy smile that resembled a child's picture of a smile.

"Wow, Rapunzel," he breathed as she gingerly approached. "You look great!"

"Thanks, so do you," she said, lying through her teeth and feeling the guilt of it stab her through her heart.

He didn't hug her, as he might have done once. He shook her hand instead, like a stranger.

"I almost didn't recognise you," he said. "You look so… different."

"My friend did my hair," Rapunzel told him, touching her braid tiara.

"That's great. I'm glad you have such good friends."

There was an undercurrent there, a tinge of regret. Maybe a sense that deep down, he knew that he'd made a mistake.

Originally, he'd been her ticket out. He'd been itinerant at the time, taking on any job and travelling across the country without a care in the world. Working for an organic grocer driving the delivery truck had brought him to Brightcircle where she'd been on kitchen duty. He got under her skin, sizing her up and dazzling her with that lopsided, careless grin. He told her stories of his travels, brought her magazines and books to look at with him in his truck. She fell for him hard, kissed him in the kitchen doorway within a week of meeting him, he proposed the following week. He was freedom to her, summed up in a person.

"Mother sends her love. She's thinking about you," he told her.

Mother Gothel hadn't reacted with fury, as Rapunzel had expected her to. She reacted with sweetness, which was even more dangerous. She invited Flynn to dinner with the Brightcircle family, even bought some wine for the occasion. She utterly charmed him, so that when she asked him to meet with her privately to discuss Rapunzel's future he agreed with no hesitation.

Rapunzel could only guess what had gone on in those meetings, but she could guess. Mother Gothel would have asked about his past, his family, why he was living such a vagabond lifestyle. Once she had exposed a weakness, she drove straight into it like a shark. It was how she'd recruited Rapunzel's parents, how she'd convinced them to hand their daughter over to be raised in the Brightcircle crèche. It was how she caught all of her followers.

Within days, Flynn was praising Mother Gothel for giving them her blessing. Then, he was praising the way Brightcircle ran its affairs. He had originally attended the sermons just to please her, but soon he was chanting and performing the affirmations as though he'd been a member all his life. By the time he got around to talking about how great it would be to raise children at Brightcircle, Rapunzel knew she'd lost him forever.

But it wasn't until he told her he was changing his name that she packed up her few possessions and left.

She didn't respond when he mentioned Gothel, and they sat in silence until the waitress came over to take their order.

"So," he began. "How are you doing?"

"I'm doing great," she answered. "I got a job. They pay me to sing."

"Wow, that's incredible!" he said with genuine enthusiasm. "Gonna become the next Gaga, eh?"

"No, no," she laughed. "It's all behind the scenes work, very high tech. If I had to sing on stage I'd probably freak out and run away screaming."

"You like it though, right?"

"I love it," she said. "It's the best thing I've ever done. I make good money, I get to sing as much as I want, I have lots of free time, I met some great people….honestly, I couldn't be happier."

"That's good to hear," he said, though there was falseness to it. She knew then, if she hadn't known before, that he was sent mostly to bring her back.

"Things are pretty great at Brightcircle," he told her. "We've got two new babies in the crèche now, and we're raising money to go to Yellowstone."

There was the hook. She'd wanted to go to Yellowstone for years.

"That'll be fun," she responded breezily. "Is everyone going?"

"Not everyone, obviously. Megan and Ingrid are staying behind to look after the kids, and Cassie and Joe will be supervising them."

Megan and Ingrid were just a little younger than Rapunzel. They must have done something to get refused for the trip, but that something could have been as innocuous as wearing colours that were too bright. And Cassie and Joe were Gothel's most trusted prison guards. If he'd hoped to reel her in, he'd failed. And she had to end this before he tried again.

"I'm going to cut to the chase, Eugene. I need to give this back."

She handed back the ring wrapped in the silk scarf he'd given it to her in. He frowned at it.

"Keep it," he said. "I gave it to you."

"I can't. I need to make a clean break and move on. I can't while I still have this."

He grudgingly took it, shoved it angrily into his pocket and took a big gulp of his coffee.

"So there's no chance you'll be coming back. Not even for me?" he spat out.

"I love you. Part of me will always love you," Rapunzel told him. "And I'll be there for you if you ever decide to leave. But right now, you're not the same man I fell in love with."

"You're wrong," he looked right into her eyes as he said this, and she shuddered at the rage in those eyes. "This is the man I was always supposed to be. I was just lost before."

Lies. He was lying, but he didn't even know it. He rose to his feet, and the last words he spoke to her before he stormed out she knew came straight from Mother Gothel.

"Burn in hell!"

…..

Harmony LTD had the main studio just a ten minute walk from the coffee shop, and Hiccup was there most days, but she couldn't bring herself to barge in there straight away.

After Flynn left, she felt physically battered. She ordered another coffee that she didn't drink, and tried to text Merida but just stared at the screen of her phone without doing anything. She left the coffee shop and wandered around the park, hoping nature would make her feel less crushed. It failed.

She caught sight of her reflection in a shop window and felt a wave of self-loathing for presenting herself to her ex-fiancée looking so glammed up. She took down the braid savagely, pulling strands from her scalp hard enough to rip them out. She took off the blazer and stuffed it into her handbag.

As the sun went down, she made her way to the studio. As expected, nobody else was there but Hiccup, working on five different computers at once and chatting with his personal AI. Rapunzel crept in, almost hoping he wouldn't notice her just yet. If she could just sit in his company for a while, she'd feel better.

"Hey, Punz! Sorry, I forgot you were stopping by today. Excuse the mess."

There were takeout cartons over almost every surface, and crumpled paper all over the floor. Rapunzel really did forget how upset she was then.

"How long have you been here?" she asked.

"About three days. Don't worry, I went home to take showers and sleep for a while. I'm reworking some of Harmony's algorithms, and I'm so close to getting it _perfect."_

Hiccup was the very definition of the word 'awkward' and most conversations with him, unless you knew him well, were peppered with a ton of sarcasm to disguise how ill at ease he was. But once you got him on the subject of AIs, and the technology that went into making them more lifelike, his whole being seemed to light up from the inside. Even if you couldn't understand half of the things he was talking about, his enthusiasm could melt hearts.

"Tell me about it," she said, sitting on the ground. She could do with losing herself in someone else's eagerness right now.

"Sure! We got these new processors recently, they're about 4 times more powerful than what we were using. I have no idea where they came from…"

He rambled on and on and she barely understood a word of it, but she nodded and made appropriate impressed noises in the right places and smiled at how happy it all made him.

"….which means our next concert is going to be the stuff of legends!"

He finished, and then turned from the computers to look at her properly.

"But that's enough about that, how are you? How was your day?"

"Good," she said. "It was a good day."

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she burst into tears. She buried her head in her arms and sobbed and sobbed as though her tears would fill up the hole she felt inside herself. Hiccup watched, aghast, and looked to Toothless as though he'd have some solution. Toothless just shrugged.

Carefully, he slid down from his chair to sit beside her on the ground and put his arm around her heaving shoulders to wait out the weeping. Gradually, the sobbing subsided and she lifted her head, wiping at her eyes furiously. Hiccup did the only thing he could think of.

"You want a donut?" he asked her, holding up the half-empty box.

She stared at him, and at the box, then back at him.

Then she burst out laughing.

Hiccup laughed too, relieved. She laughed and wiped her eyes and felt a hundred times better.

"You…wanna talk about it?" he asked her.

"No, no," she shook her head. "It all just got a bit too much, that's all. I'm fine."

"Well, this is the perfect place to come to when life gets too much. Why do you think I spend so much time here? It's like a soundproof metal womb…"

She happily let him ramble on some more as she bit into a donut. Aside from that one little blip, it had been a good day after all.


End file.
